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Havana To Unlock Hemingway Papers
The New York Times
September 21, 2002
By KATE ZERNIKE
The Cuban government has agreed to allow access to a trove of Ernest
Hemingway's papers that experts say promises to illuminate the period in which
he wrote some of his most significant works.
The collection, deteriorating amid rifles and stuffed African game heads in
the basement of Hemingway's home outside Havana, includes 3,000 letters and
documents, 3,000 photographs and 9,000 books, many with his musings in the
margins -- what one biographer, A. Scott Berg, called a "CAT scan of Hemingway's
brain."
Those who helped persuade the Cubans to open the collection, ending an
impasse that has frustrated American scholars for 40 years, say they have seen
just a small fraction of it, but it already offers hints of Hemingway's creative
process: raw fragments of stories scribbled on paper and book jackets, galleys
and early drafts of major works, and a poetry anthology in which he circled "No
man is an island," the line from John Donne that would serve as the epigraph to
"For Whom the Bell Tolls."
There is Hemingway's copy of the screenplay for "The Old Man and the Sea,"
with his notations. There is a scrap of paper on which he jotted a
profanity-laced conversation from World War II, which he apparently planned to
000200000B3B00000842 B35,
use in a story, but then dismissed, writing above it, "too frank." There is the
start of an epilogue, later rejected, to "For Whom the Bell Tolls."
The documents also reveal details of Hemingway's personal life: he recorded
his weight and blood pressure almost obsessively on the inside cover of his copy
of "Wuthering Heights." In a written soliloquy dated June 1, 1953, he agonized
about his conflicted feelings for his fourth wife, Mary, wondering whether he
should accept her as a scold or "learn not to give a damn about her." He then
sent it to her with a cover letter asking her to read it when she got a chance.
There are directions to the servants on how to prepare the Hemingways' favorite
foods, and in what order to present them. Another note instructs them not to
disturb him while he is writing. There are Michelin maps of Spain with names of
people he met and restaurants and hotels he visited.
"This really is the last frontier," said Sandra Spanier, a scholar who is
involved in the preservation effort, and was chosen last year as the editor of a
new collection of Hemingway letters. "We haven't known much about the period he
spent in Cuba, except that it was extremely significant and extremely long. This
is very promising and not yet fully mapped territory."
Under an agreement with Cuba to be announced in November, American
conservators will begin repairing and preserving the materials and scanning and
microfilming them. The originals will remain in Cuba, but the electronic
collection will be stored in the United States, at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Library and Museum in Boston, which already has a small Hemingway archive. An
inventory of the collection will be available online.
Hemingway spent a third of his life in Cuba, where he lived longer than
anywhere else. There, he wrote "The Old Man and the Sea," "For Whom the Bell
Tolls," and manuscripts that would be published posthumously, including "A
Moveable Feast." He felt such fondness for Cuba that he donated the medal from
his 1954 Nobel Prize to the shrine of Virgen de Cobre, the country's patron
saint.
Cubans returned the affection with equal intensity. As Patrick Hemingway, the
author's son, said in an interview, "I think many Cubans don't realize he wasn't
a Cuban." When Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, shortly after the Bay of
Pigs invasion, the Cuban government allowed Mary Hemingway to remove 200 pounds
of papers, but insisted that most of their home's contents remain untouched. She
left the house to the Cubans, who turned it into a museum. The Cuban government
has been so protective of its holdings that visitors are allowed only to peer
through the windows, where they can see Hemingway's Cinzano bottles and
typewriter gathering dust. And no one, not even Cuban scholars, has been allowed
0002000008A700001377 8A1,
to see the documents in the basement.
The agreement to allow the Americans to preserve the documents began with a
visit to the museum in January 2001 by Jenny Phillips, a granddaughter of
Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway's editor and close friend. Ms. Phillips asked a
curator if there might be letters from her grandfather inside, and upon hearing
who he was, Ms. Phillips said, the curator invited her and her husband for a
special tour of the house, known as Finca Vígia. But they, too, were told they
could not enter the basement.
Back home in suburban Boston, the Phillipses went to the Kennedy Library,
where Mary Hemingway had donated the papers she removed from Cuba. Stephen
Plotkin, a past curator there, told them he knew of the materials and called
their deterioration "an archival emergency," but also said that he and other
scholars had given up hope of gaining access to them.
The Phillipses sought help from Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts
Democrat and longtime advocate of normalizing relations with Cuba. Over the
course of a year, Mr. McGovern negotiated with the Cuban government to release
and preserve the materials on the condition that they remain in Cuba; the Cubans
said they had rebuffed all previous efforts because American scholars had always
wanted to take the originals to the United States.
An initial agreement was signed in January, and in March, the Phillipses
returned to the house with Ms. Spanier, conservators and Mr. Berg, who had
written a biography of Perkins and had studied under Carlos Baker, another
Hemingway biographer, at Princeton.
"I think I've read all the biographies of Hemingway and I've never had a a
complete sense of him until I smelled this house and saw some of these things,"
Mr. Berg said. "This is what has been missing on Hemingway, this is the stuff
that makes him come alive."
Entering the house's humid, dirt-floored basement, the conservators found
many books damaged by insects, and papers fading. But they also found
photographs by Robert Capa taken during the Spanish Civil War, 26 letters
written by Adriana Ivancich, the young Italian countess who was the subject of
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Hemingway's infatuation and reportedly the model for the heroine in "Over the
River and Into the Trees." There are also other letters, from Ezra Pound and
Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway's former wife. There are also lists of provisions he
would need for trips on his boat, the Pilar, and instructions from his children
's pediatrician jotted inside books.
"Just to have that kind of quotidiana on an important figure is the kind of
thing biographers dream of," said Mr. Berg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his
biography of Charles Lindbergh.
Most revealing, he said, was the memo in which Hemingway poured out his
conflicts with his wife.
"If that document exists, I imagine others in the same vein do," Mr. Berg
said. "And even if they don't, even if that is unique, it suggests a whole kind
of dialogue between Ernest and Mary Hemingway that I don't think we knew about,
a whole level of pain and candor I have not seen anywhere else."
In one folder, Hemingway had saved newspaper articles about his presumed --
and greatly exaggerated -- death in a plane crash in Africa in 1954. Another
folder is filled with 1925 book reviews of "In Our Time."
"Just seeing what he saved is an interesting gauge of the things he valued,"
Ms. Spanier said.
While Hemingway has been the subject of endless study -- not to mention the
inspiration for a licensed line of furniture -- his 21 years in Cuba are the
least understood period of his life, scholars say. Mr. Berg said Mr. Baker never
visited Cuba. In Michael Reynolds's five-volume biography of Hemingway, there
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are three volumes covering the first 30 years of his life, and only one covering
the last 21.
"We don't have the depth to write about that period," Ms. Spanier said.
The curators at the Finca, she added, had taken great care to preserve the
documents despite a lack of resources. There was a trunk stenciled "Tropicana,"
filled with letters; a curator begged for it from the nightclub of the same name
because she was worried about the effect of the temperature changes on the
documents. Another curator, finding the kind of acid-free paper she needed to
preserve the documents in a shoebox, went to a shoe factory to ask for more of
it.
"If something isn't done, it will simply deteriorate," Patrick Hemingway said
of the collection.
Earlier this month, the Rockefeller Foundation granted the conservators
$75,000 to pay for the initial preservation, and Mr. McGovern said he hoped to
raise an additional $25,000 privately. |
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